News Archive

Mayo Clinic researchers have developed a genome-based immunization strategy to fight feline AIDS and illuminate ways to combat human HIV/AIDS and other diseases. The goal is to create cats with intrinsic immunity to the feline AIDS virus. The findings — called fascinating and landmark by one reviewer — appear in the current online issue of Nature Methods.

Injecting modified bacteria related to those which cause tuberculosis could protect against the lung disease, US scientists say. Experiments on mice showed the injections could completely eliminate tuberculosis bacteria in some cases, Nature Medicine reports.

A blood-borne immune factor present in elderly mice contributes to signs of mental decline when injected into young mice, and inhibiting it restores youthfulness in old mice, according to an article published online (August 31) in Nature.

Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have converted stem cells from the human endometrium into insulin-producing cells and transplanted them into mice to control the animals’ diabetes.

Reconnecting severed blood vessels is mostly done the same way today — with sutures — as it was 100 years ago, when the French surgeon Alexis Carrel won a Nobel Prize for advancing the technique. Now, a team of researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine has developed a sutureless method that appears to be a faster, safer and easier alternative.

Short-term energy storage in animal cells is usually achieved through the accumulation of glucose, in the form of long and branched chains, known as glycogen. But when this accumulation happens in neurons it is fatal, causing them to degenerate.

A new atlas of gene expression in the mouse brain provides insight into how genes work in the outer part of the brain called the cerebral cortex. In humans, the cerebral cortex is the largest part of the brain, and the region responsible for memory, sensory perception and language. Mice and people share 90 percent of their genes so the atlas, which is based on the study of normal mice, lays a foundation for future studies of mouse models for human diseases

In a study of the transparent roundworm C. elegans, researchers found that a genetic switch in master neurons inhibits the proper functioning of protective cell stress responses, leading to the accumulation of misfolded and damaged proteins.

Caffeine guards against certain skin cancers at the molecular level, according to a study appearing online August 15, 2011, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that explains how the process likely works.

In a recent issue of Cancer Research, Daniel J. Powell, Jr., PhD, a research assistant professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, showed for the first time that engineered human T cells can eradicate deadly human ovarian cancer in immune-deficient mice.

In new research that could have implications for improving fertilization in humans and other mammals, life scientists studied interactions between individual sperm and eggs in red abalone, an ocean-dwelling snail, and made precise chemical measurements and physical models of these interactions.

Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have discovered the biological mechanism behind age-related loss of muscle strength and identified a drug that may help reverse this process. Their findings were published in the August 2 online edition of Cell Metabolism.

Scientists have found a flu "super antibody" called FI6 that can fight all types of influenza A viruses that cause disease in humans and animals and say their discovery may be a turning point in the development of new flu treatments.

Every year, millions of people contend with lower back and neck discomfort. With intent to ease their pain, Cornell University engineers in Ithaca and doctors at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City have created a biologically based spinal implant that could someday spell relief for these countless sufferers.

NIH-funded scientists have developed a strain of mice with a built-in off switch that can selectively shut down the animals' serotonin-producing cells, which make up a brain network controlling breathing, temperature regulation, and mood.

In the July 26 issue of PLoS Biology, Dr. Dongsheng Cai and his research team at Albert Einstein College of Medicine describe a pathway that directs the brain to sense the body's glucose dynamics, and they find that a defect of this glucose sensing process contributes to the development of obesity and related disease.